Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: These use cases that you discussed, are all these use cases that you found yourself and are selling directly?

Brian Sathianathan: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the first use case – gas station loyalty program. Who built the solution?

Brian Sathianathan: Parts of the solution are built on top of our platform. We provide a lot of core components to do these things. You can drag and drop those vision recognition models. Underneath, we support frameworks like Python and various image frameworks. That’s productized as part of the license. In the gas station scenario, we had LPR built in, but we had to do a lot of integration. We have a small service team that built it. The customer had their own SI’s.

Sramana Mitra: It’s driven by the CIO?

Brian Sathianathan: The Head of Innovation.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve said that a couple of times. Let’s probe that. Head of Innovation is a function that you’re running into more often.

Brian Sathianathan: Correct. These are VP of Innovation or VP of Technology reporting to the marketing organization.

Sramana Mitra: Marketing organization?

Brian Sathianathan: Yes. We actually have one Head of Innovation reporting to a CTO. It’s not so much a CIO but a CTO.

Sramana Mitra: This is true about retail in general?

Brian Sathianathan: Not all retail but the groups that we are working with – convenience, beauty, direct selling. It’s not common across the space. CIO looks at major internal platforms and the core commerce platform. Anything that’s beyond servicing customer is within marketing.

Sramana Mitra: How many Chief Innovation Officers are you working with right now?

Brian Sathianathan: Quite a few. We have deep relationships with a lot of them. We’re talking tens.

Sramana Mitra: What are their priorities?

Brian Sathianathan: Let me talk about Chief Innovation priorities and then the CMO priorities. A lot of the Chief Innovation priorities are primarily moving quickly in digital platforms and making sure that the major platforms within the company are all cloud-ready and ready for heavy scale. Let me drill down a bit. If you have a traditional commerce platform that’s very much monolithic, a lot of CIOs are going into how do you go into headless commerce or API-based commerce so you can serve commerce in every form factor. That’s one thing.

Traditionally, because customer data platform providers used to provide a very monolithic system, a lot of those are getting connected into cloud. The CMO or the Innovation Head is concerned with how to get more consumers to one of the brand and problems like damage estimation. A lot of CMOs priorities are use-case driven as opposed to platform-driven.

Sramana Mitra: Outside of retail, what are you seeing?

Brian Sathianathan: Outside of retail, there are a couple of things. In telecoms, there’s a lot of focus on the 5G side.

Sramana Mitra: What do they want to do with 5G?

Brian Sathianathan: Really rapid cases where you don’t need to depend on core network but on edge processing and a combination of edge and the cloud. Let me drill down on a couple of use cases. One of those things is truck loading and frequency by using existing vision cameras. Basically inventory counting and stuff like that.

The other is in warehouses. We’re seeing a lot of path optimization problems that are run in 5G. We are also seeing a lot of looking at all the way from temperature sensing, crop monitoring all the way to automotive. Those are the priorities of those industries.

Banking and insurance is different. There is a lot of document routing and workflow. There is a lot of paper. Once you convert to digital, there’s a lot of natural language processing (NLP) required. If somebody uploaded an invoice, how quickly can you respond? You are able to understand the customer’s application and rapidly connect that to the legacy systems and mainframes, and use NLP to score the customer.

We’re seeing a lot of end-to-end workflows and disaggregation like better frontend experiences with customers. The backend is more document workflow.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan
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